Healing Begins with Holding Nothing Back

I love Pandora.com - sometimes it just knows what songs I need and when.  While listening to one of my stations I've got programmed in by having some favorite artists and track seeds as a guide for this online radio to do its thing, I often think, "how did it know to play that for me?"

It happened this week with the following two songs, which were played one after the other.  Strong themes of freedom flow through them.  There is meaning here for me, especially as I'm seeking hard after freedom this year, trying to encompass the meaning in my life.



I always like Tenth Avenue North.  This was my first time hearing their song "Healing Begins."  The video is powerful and brought me to tears for some reason.  I've printed out the lyrics of both songs and pasted them in my Freedom Journal.  These are some of the words that stick out to me as significant: 

"So let it fall down; There's freedom waiting in the sound; When you let your walls fall to the ground"

"This is where the healing begins, oh; This is where the healing starts; When you come to where you're broken within; The light meets the dark"

"Sparks will fly as grace collides; With the dark inside of us..."




This song "Holding Nothing Back" is performed by Jesus Culture, a group I'd love to see in person sometime.  The song "He Loves Us" was what began my love for this group.

It starts, "I am chosen, I am free; I am living for eternity; Free now forever." 

And the chorus is, "My chains fell off; My heart was free; I'm alive to live for you."

The song ends, "I'm free to live; Free to give; Free to be; I'm free to love you."

The lyrics of these songs have great depth of meaning for me. 

The secret message here is just as I titled this blog post:
 
Healing Begins with Holding Nothing Back.

And I am trying to live this, to reach that freedom within.

Black Maria Film Festival 6 - We're Part of the City

The sixth short film shown in the sequence my sister and I saw at the viewing of the Black Maria Film Festival that we attended was "We're Part of the City, 4th Movement," an eight minute piece by Luca Segall and Stanzi Vaubel of Brooklyn, NY.  As included in the online description of the films shown during the viewing at the Des Moines Art Center, "We’re Part of the City, 4th Movement is an astonishing, revelatory experimental work chronicling the New York City ‘Occupy Wall Street’ protest in a style that is as rebellious as the movement itself. Fractured sound and images collide and interweave, reverse, repeat in a collage of energy, all of which reverberates with and echoes the vitality, passion, and chaos of the movement."

I spent time trying to find something, anything from the filmmakers about this film, but there is no website, nothing.  All I come across are descriptions from sites that host the Black Maria Film Fest and the Film Fest's website.  I would like to watch this film again because it included such busy, bustling scenes, filled with chaotic energy and music.  The juxtaposition of images shown was very interesting.  For example, there'd be someone in a business suit next to someone with a disheveled appearance.... people creating makeshift signs that I wish I could remember the words of...  all of these unseemingly related elements together in one place...  that it what sticks with me as the most impressive part of the film.

The topic of the whole "Occupy Wall Street" movement is a touchy subject for many people.  I could sense discomfort in the audience while this piece was showing and there was one person who even walked out.  The film didn't have words to go along with it, no commentary, but perhaps the images and music in the way they were placed was a statement enough for people to take offense to it?  I don't know.  I've had mixed feelings about the movement.  I have wondered what it is going to accomplish, if anything?  And if there's a way that a more cohesive statement can be made?

But then I realize how difficult it is to organize things and especially to get people to do something together in one place.  At least that step has been done through "Occupy Wall Street."  It has brought people together who otherwise would have nothing to do with each other, most likely, because as you see in "We're Part of the City" there are all these different people together in one scene...  I just don't know what exactly is being accomplished, and I saw last night on the news that there were "Occupy Wall Street" protesters who were throwing feces on the street and even in an ATM machine...  That I don't agree with at all.  There's got to be more constructive ways to express angry feelings and disagreement, and I think that's part of my ambiguity with this whole thing...  If people could fully express the depth of their anger and what it is exactly that they want to see changed, what it is that they think is unfair and unjust and what they're against, then perhaps there'd be some success?  And it wouldn't look like just a random, unsynchronized movement by outsiders looking in? 

I think it's worth including this:


I will say this:  Luca Segall and Stanzi Vaubel did an excellent job at taking all the chaotic pieces and weaving them together hamoniously into something cohesive that was all at once interesting and thought-provoking.  While writing this I was listening to Beethoven's Symphony No.5, 4th Movement because it seemed to fit.   I just wish they'd share more online somewhere about "We're Part of the City" because I want to see it again and hear more about what was behind the creation of this important short film.  And I have ideas building of what could add to the statement of this movement that will fit with the last film shown in this series, so I will share them later.


In this series:
Black Maria Film Fest 1 - Anima Mundi
Black Maria Film Fest 2 - Installation
Black Maria Film Fest 3 & 4 - Hip Priest & Be Filled with the Spirit
Black Maria Film Fest 5 - Yelp!

Local Art Inspires Me: Linda Sue Finkelstein

This is a page from my Freedom Journal, in which I glued pictures and words from the brochure of local artist Linda Sue Finkelstein, along with a couple of other images, then decorated with colored pencil.   

I found the brochure and viewed some of Linda's work at a gallery on the artist outing I took where Freedom, My Word occurred, confirming the direction being taken with my pursuit.  I find freedom in art.  The paintings and the mixed media art that I viewed by Linda that day were freeing to me.  The way strokes of paint are made with the brush on her pieces embodies that "flow" that she describes in her brochure as being "randomness and deliberateness and joy intertwined." 

It is encouraging to me to discover the work of local artists who are close enough to meet in person sometime.  Linda offers art classes, and perhaps I will have the opportunity to participate in one at some point.  Knowing that option is available and that there are artists in my vicinity who find freedom through their medium is inspiring to me. 

This quote from Georgia O'Keefe was shared in Linda's brochure, and I understand it completely:
"I could say things with colors and shapes that I couldn't say any other way - things I had no words for." 

Freedom Stone

For some reason, I had never noticed the inscription on this stone down in the front of our neighbor's driveway.  We've lived here for almost 6 years now, and I've walked past it plenty of times.  But during this certain walk on this certain day, when the sun reflected off the rock's surface so brightly,

I took a closer look and noticed

FREEDOM shining back at me. 

Freedom:  the word I am seeking this year;

Freedom:  the word that is pursuing me. 

Freedom, a reminder, just a few doors down from me. 

How is my word-pursuit coming so far?

Do I feel like I've reached the freedom I seek?

I feel like it is coming, but I'm nowhere near where I want to be.  When I hear myself resounding freedom, it surprises me.  I don't feel fully free in my mind and in my body.  Those old ways are like krazy glue; sticky to the point where they've calloused me, and it takes a lot of intentional rubbing to remove that dead skin that roughens me.

It's just like that poem I found when I searched "peeling,"

and those words:  "by the Rock I rub against, I'm going to be tender again."  It's seeing with the new eyes and the messages are all around me and I need patience because it takes time to soak all this in deep enough to the point where it permeates the cells of my being and recreates my thought patterns...

There is joy in the trying, and I sure am, and it is worth something.  My life is going to shine freedom, gloriously, as glory comes down, arising and shining,

that I may reflect light, illuminating

like stars shine bright.

And then, there are these words from an Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood, which I just found this morning on Poets.org, and is by the infamous William Wadsworth.  These phrases just seem to fit:

"The fulness of your bliss, I feel--I feel it all."

"I hear, I hear, with joy I hear!"

"Whither is fled the visionary gleam?

Where is it now, the glory and the dream?"

"But trailing clouds of glory do we come
               From God, who is our home:"

"See, at his feet, some little plan or chart,

Some fragment from his dream of human life,

Shaped by himself with newly-learned art;"

"And unto this he frames his song:"

"A place of thoughts where we in waiting lie;

Thou little child, yet glorious in the might

Of heaven-born freedom on thy being's height,"

 "Those shadowy recollections,          

Which, be they what they may,

Are yet the fountain-light of all our day,

Are yet a master-light of all our seeing;"

"Thanks to the human heart by which we live,

Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,

To me the meanest flower that blows can give

Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears."